During his work with Amnesty International highlighting innocent death row victims, he met Sunny Jacobs.

Sonia Jacobs, 64, was arrested after a February 1976 shootout with two policemen in Florida in which the officers were killed.

Jacobs and her husband had been passengers in the car driven by Walter Rhodes Junior when it was pulled over by police. Both Rhodes and Jacobs' husband Jesse Tafero had prior convictions.

Rhodes turned evidence and claimed it was Jacobs and Tafero who had shot and killed the policemen. A jailhouse informant also told the court that Jacobs had told him she was involved.

Jacobs also received the death sentence and her husband was eventually executed in 1990.

She, however, won her case on appeal after the jailhouse informant recanted and it became clear that it was Walter Rhodes who had fired the fatal shots and Jacobs was freed after seventeen years in jail.

She and Pringle began seeing each other and often spoke at conferences on the death penalty together.

“We didn’t just share a past, we had a vision for a future,” . Jacobs told The New York Times, which featured their wedding “Sure, Peter and I were also physically attracted to one another, but it was deeper than that,” she said. “You know what happens to attractive, it becomes wrinkled and fat.”

In December 2001, she joined him in his cottage beside the sea in Galway.”

“Sunny teaches yoga, I live on a pension,” Mr. Pringle told the Times . “We have two hens, two ducks and eight goats. We both milk the goats and Sunny makes cheese. It’s really a nice, simple life.”

The Jacobs story became a hit Broadway play and three of the actresses who played her Brooke Shields, Marlo Thomas and Amy Irving turned up for the wedding.

“Playing Sunny was so claustrophobic for me,” Shields told the Times, “You felt her powerlessness, this was a woman in the wrong place at the wrong time, the same for Peter.

“But despite everything they have been through, they are not bitter or jaded, they never closed their hearts. They are two people who are at peace with themselves and with the world. They could not have been more fated and meant to be with one another.”

Jacobs and Mr. Pringle exchanged wedding vows and Irish Claddagh rings before a Hindu priest, and one of the most extraordinary marriages on record went into the books.